The Dark Tower Part 34

It was not until they reached the Marne that Winn found time to write to Claire. "We are getting on very nicely," he wrote. "I hope you are not worrying about us. We have plenty to eat, though we have to take our meals a little hurriedly.

"There is a good deal of work to do.

"This war is the best thing that ever happened to me--bar one. Before I came out I thought I should go to pieces. I feel quite free to write to you now. I do not think there can be any harm in it, so I hope you won't mind. If things do not seem to be going very well with us at first, remember that they never do.

"Every campaign I ever went in for, we were short-handed to start with, and had to fight against odds, which doesn't matter really if you have the right men, but always takes longer and looks discouraging to outsiders. The men are very good and I am glad the War Office let me commandeer the boots I wanted--the kind they offered me at first wouldn't have done at all for this sort of work. It is rather hard not being with the men more, but the work is very absorbing, so I do not mind as much as I did.

"I think the regiment will come out later, and they have promised to let me go back into it. I am sorry about the villages. It's a pity the Germans slopped over into France at all. I found two Uhlans yesterday in a farmyard; they had been behaving badly, so I did them both in.

"One very seldom sees any of them, worse luck.

"I hope you are taking great care of yourself and not worrying. Your loving Winn."

In the weeks that followed, Claire got many letters. They were short letters, written in flying motors, in trains, in outhouses, in romantic chateaux; but they all began in the same rea.s.suring way. "I am very well, and we are getting on quite nicely."

The Allied line was being flung out in wild curves and swoops like the flight of a dove before a hawk; from Soissons up toward Calais they fenced and circled.

They retook Rheims, they seized Amiens. Lille fell from them and Laon.

The battle of the Aisne pa.s.sed by slow degrees out of their hands, and the English found themselves fighting their extraordinary first fight for Ypres. They stood between the Germans and the Channel ports as thinly as a j.a.panese screen, between England and the Atlantic. The very camp cooks were in the trenches.

Time fled like a long thunderous hour. It was a storm that flashed and fell and returned again.

Winn was beginning to feel tired now. He hardly slept at night, and by day his brain moved as if it were made of red-hot steel, flying rapidly from expedient to expedient, facing the hourly problems of that wild and wet October, how to keep men alive who never rested, who were too few, who took the place of guns. He wrote more seldom now, and once he said, "We are having rather a hard time, but we shall get through with it."

Fortunately all Englishmen are born with a curious pioneer instinct, and being the least adaptable people in the world, they have learned the more readily to adapt the changes of the hour.

They remade their external world, out of this new warfare.

They remade it at the cost of their lives in Flanders, in the face of incredulous enemies and criticizing neutrals, painstakingly, without science, doggedly out of their own wills. They held Ypres by a thread, and when it seemed that nothing could keep it, one cold and dreadful day along the Menin road came up their reinforcements.

First one group and then another of tall, dark people, silent footed as falling leaves, turbaned black faces, eyes of appalling and unearthly gravity, hearts half like a rock and half like a child, alien captive people of another blood, took their place silently, regiment by regiment blocking up the dreadful gaps with their guns, their rifles, and the free gift of their lives.

"Lionel has come," Winn wrote, "and all my men. I never was so glad of anything, but you. Send me all the warm things you can. The winter will be quite jolly now when the men get used to the trenches. It's a funny thing, but they've given me command of the regiment. I hadn't expected it, but I've always liked handling Sikhs. Whatever happens, you'll remember that I've been an awfully lucky chap, won't you?"

CHAPTER x.x.xI

Lionel and Winn talked of the regiment and the war; these two things filled the exacting hours. In a world a very long way off and in the depths of their hearts were England and Claire.

They spent three weeks in the trenches, blackened and water clogged and weary.

It was the darkest time of a dark December, the water was up to their waists, there was no draining the treacherous clay surfaces. The men suffered to the limit of their vitality and sometimes pa.s.sed it; they needed constant care and watching. It had to be explained to them that they were not required to give up their lives to spirits, in a land that wors.h.i.+ped idols. Behind the strange lights and noises heralding death there were solid people who ate sausages, and could be killed.

One or two small parties led in night attacks overcame the worst of their fears.

Later on when the mud dried they could kill more; in the end all would be killed, and they would return with much honor to their land of suns.h.i.+ne.

To the officers who moved among them, absorbed in the questions of their care, there was never any silence or peace, and yet there was a strange content in the huddled, altered life of their wet ditch.

Every power of the will, every nerve of the body, was being definitely used. Winn and Lionel felt a strange mood of exultation. They pushed back difficulties and pierced insoluble problems with prompt escapes.

Only from time to time casualties dropped in upon them grimly, impervious to human ingenuity.

In the quieter hours of the night, they crouched side by side formulating fresh schemes and going over one by one the weak points of their defenses.

They hadn't enough guns, or any reinforcements; they had no dry clothes.

The men were not accustomed to wet climates or invisible enemies.

They wanted more sand-bags and more bombs, and it would be better for human beings not to be in trenches for three weeks at a time in the rain.

They sat there pitting their brains against these obstacles, creating the miraculous ingenuity of war. Personal questions dropped. Lionel saw that Winn was ill beyond mending, but he saw it without definite thought--it was one more obstacle in a race of obstacles. It wouldn't do for Winn to break down. He fitted himself without explanations, selflessly, with magnificent disinterestedness, into his friend's needs.

He was like a staff in the hand of a blind man.

Winn himself had begun to wonder, moving about in his sea of mud, how much worse you could be before you were actually done. His cough shook him incessantly, his brain burned, and his hands were curiously weak. He was conscious that he had to repeat to himself all day long the things he had to do; even then he might have forgotten if there had not been Lionel. He might have forgotten to give orders. In spite of everything a strange inner bliss possessed him which nourished him like food. He had Claire's letters, they never failed him, they were as regular as the beats of a heart. Something in him lived that had never lived before, something that did not seem likely ever to die.

It was helping him as Lionel was helping him to get through things. What he had to get through was dying. It was going to be quicker than the way they had of dying in Davos, but it mightn't be quick enough; it might drive him out of his last fight, back to an inconceivable stale world.

This must not happen. Lionel must live and he must die, where he was.

You could bully fate, if you were prepared to pay the price for it.

Winn was not sure yet what the price would be, he was only sure that he was prepared to pay it.

They were to be relieved next day. The men were so worn out that they could hardly move. Winn and Lionel found their own bodies difficult to control; they had become heavy and inert from want of sleep, but their minds were alive and worked with feverish swiftness, like the minds of people in a long illness, when consciousness creeps above the level of pain.

Winn had just returned from his evening round of the trenches. Lionel was resting in his dug-out; he heard Winn's approach. Winn was coughing again--a little choking, short cough.

He bent double and crouched down beside Lionel without speaking.

"Well," said Lionel, "to-morrow we'll be out of this. About time too--with that cough of yours."

Winn was silent for a moment, then he said, "I suppose you know I'm nearly done?"

Lionel bowed his head. "Yes," he muttered, "I suppose I know it."

After a pause Winn began again.

"There isn't much good talking, of course. On the other hand, you may as well know what I feel. I've had tremendous luck in one way and another.

I never expected to get the regiment, for instance--and your coming out here and all that. I've seen how jolly things could be."

"You haven't had them," said Lionel in a low voice. "The things you wanted most, I mean. Your pitch was queered too soon."

"I don't know," said Winn, painstakingly. "In a sense, of course, you haven't had things if you've only seen 'em. Still when you come to think of it, you partly have. Look at the Germans; we've worked considerably into them without seeing 'em, haven't we? What I mean is that I appreciate goodness now; I see its point. Not that I'd have kept clear a moment by myself. I hope you quite understand that? I've been a blackguard and I'd have been a worse one if I'd had the chance. But I'm glad I hadn't the chance now. I don't know that I'm putting the thing straight--but you know what she's like? Thank G.o.d I couldn't alter her!"

They listened for a moment to the night. Their ears were always awake, registering sounds from the sodden, death-ridden fields beneath them, and above, but they heard nothing beyond the drip of the rain, an occasional groan from a man tortured by rheumatism, and the long-drawn scream of a distant sh.e.l.l.